


Particle Flux

by kiss_of_a_wave



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fix-It, Force Bond, I guess this is a fix-it now, No beta we die like....Han..., Non TROS compliant, Soul Bond, Soulmates, Throne Room Scene, Years of Mutual Pining, a Gordon Lightfoot song is responsible for this, fucking a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21656746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiss_of_a_wave/pseuds/kiss_of_a_wave
Summary: She hears this whisper, you are everything you are everything you are everything and the echo if it stirs in her own chest and and in the sacred cavern of her mind. In the secret reservoir of balance and energy that has always given her strength, even when surrender would have felt like mercy. The same place that had called to him like a beacon, and been called to his in return.“Come with me,” she whispers, not sure that he can even hear her over the cacophony. “Ben, come with me.”(Rey takes one last trip into her past before plunging headlong into her future).
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 107





	1. Particle Flux

_**My shelter, come with me**_

**_You know in this hell I am torn_ **

**_Flux of terrain we’ve been on before_  
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**_**Made it through oblivion, then they closed the door**_ ** ********  
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All the stars are falling. 

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Her heart beats so wildly it hurts, beats so hard that it threatens to break out of her chest. Breaking through might be a mercy; if it stays where it is it may shatter into pieces. Its threatened many times in Rey’s short life, but it’s never thundered with an exquisite ache like this before. 

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“Please,” he whispers. His voice silences all other sound, from the livid hiss of severed wires to Rey’s own sobbing breaths. “Please.”

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He may as well have plunged a saber into her chest, or let Snoke finish her in the devastatingly brutal way he had promised. Nothing, not even those years of desperate, aching longing and loneliness in the desert hurt as much as his words. As his gloved, trembling hand reaching across a gulf of air for hers. Waiting. 

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_Waiting, waiting, waiting _.__

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“Ben,” she whispers. Somehow her heart doesn’t shatter, even as her voice is drowned out by the thick drone of blood in her head. “Don’t do this.” 

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Rey is tired, so tired. Her muscles shriek with pain from the fight and the gash on her arm throbs. If she weren’t so damn tired she would scream at him. Rage at him like an animal, hurl words like knives in a way that he can understand. 

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Not like the time. In the forest, or on Luke’s island. Words like “monster” and “snake” won’t hit the mark anymore, and it would hurt her ore to say them than it would Ben to hear them. Rey wants to fling herself at him and pummel him with her fists because the look in his eyes, the plea etched across his face and surely mirrored on her own, is the cruelest thing she’s ever seen. Crueler than watching her parents’ retreating ship (if they even really were your parents, she reminds herself). More cruel than a lightsaber glowly redly on Han Solo’s dying face. 

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Ben has found her in the heart of an endless desert and offered her water, only to withdraw it. He has staunched a wound that has bled in her for years, then removed the pressure and left her to bleed to death. Cruelty and coldness were so much kinder than this plea, and the rich promise in it. 

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His words drift in and out of her understanding. She barely comprehends them, even as fresh tears scorch their way down her cold face. The substance of his words barely matter as he tells her two things she already knows: that her parents were never coming back for her, and that she is nothing. 

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The third thing Ben tells her nearly causes her heart to stop in her chest. The words matter less than the aching tenderness in his voice, and the finality of it. 

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_But not to me _.__

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Nothing, but not to him. Not nothing, she thinks feverishly. Never _nothing _, she who can lift boulders with a breath, who bested him in combat in that cold forest, in what now seems like a different age. Rey of Jakku is not nothing; if she had been she would have been buried beneath the sand years ago.__

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Rey hears his words, but sees his face more clearly. She feels him more acutely; his thoughts infiltrate her mind effortlessly, unbidden. It is as intimate as feeling the red pulse of his blood inside his veins, knowing the precise rhythm of his heart. There is no way for her to hide from him, nor him from her. The linking of their minds closed that path completely and irreparably. 

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So when Ben says _you are nothing _, in the deep cavern of his soul, where the dark hasn’t had an opportunity to take root, he means _you are everything, you are all there is _. In that quiet, secret part of his mind there is no Snoke or Vader or even Luke. Rey stares into it and finds only herself gazing back at her.____

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She hears this whisper, _you are everything you are everything you are everything _and the echo if it stirs in her own chest and and in the sacred cavern of her mind. In the secret reservoir of balance and energy that has always given her strength, even when surrender would have felt like mercy. The same place that had called to him like a beacon, and been called to his in return.__

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“Come with me,” she whispers, not sure that he can even hear her over the cacophony. “Ben, come with _me _.”__

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For a moment he looks like she’s struck him. His face reminds her of when she’d first called Luke’s lightsaber to her hand with the Force. All awe and wonder and fear, and a terrible longing. “What?”

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“You’re clinging to something that is disintegrating before your very eyes,” Rey hisses through clenched teeth. She feels his fear, his confusion. The fear is great enough that she’s afraid he’ll run and be lost to her forever. “There is nothing for you here. There never was. You could never belong here, Ben. The trying alone will kill you.” 

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He blinks hard at her. His mouth opens and closes as if he’d meant to say something, then decided against it. “I can’t go back with you,” he says slowly. “You know I can’t.”

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Rey feels the old rage simmering beneath his skin like a burn. It is not focused on her, but on himself, on his own weakness and lack of resolve. Rey clenches her fists so hard she feels blood leak around her fingernails. The pain grounds her, helps to anchor her in the moment. “You said you want to leave it all behind, yes?” She swallows and wills her voice not to crack. “Then let both our pasts die. Leave the First Order to cave in on itself. And I…” Her heart clenches at the memory of Finn’s smile, and the comfort of Leia’s arms. “And I’ll leave the Resistance. They won’t need me now.” 

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__Not forever, she promises them silently.__

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For a moment it looks as though is knees might buckle. His eyes are huge, wide, and sheened with tears. “Why?” He asks. There is nothing of Kylo Ren, the Sith, or dark side in his voice. The words are Ben Solo’s, abandoned to his own devices years ago. “Why would you leave it for me?”

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Rey grits her teeth and fights the urge to rage and claw at him, while the other part threatens to shatter. You know why, she wants to scream. You have always known. Instead, she says just loud enough for him to hear, “if you don’t come with me right now, I will disappear. I will go across the galaxy, and I will train for as long as it takes to surpass you, and once I’m stronger I’ll come back.” She takes a step closer to him, close enough to feel the warmth of his body through the terrible cold of Snoke’s chamber. “And I will cut down every woman, every man, every thing that stands between you and me, and when I reach you I will drag you away with me by force.” 

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Her breath scrapes its way out of her lungs, as though she’s been running hard for a long time. She’s not sure where the words come from, but she knows once they’re spoken that they’re true, that they are _hers _.__

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Ben takes a step away from her but her hand shoots out, lightning quick, to grab his wrist. It is the first deliberate touch they’d shared since the island. The contact makes her shiver, but she plants her feet firmly. “Let’s not go down that path, then.” She blinks, and tears of rage and grim determination slip through. Her voice softens. “I don’t want to hurt you again. Please don’t make me.” Shaking now, she looks up into his eyes, she regrets the ear she sees there, though the relief of seeing him bend to her nearly makes giddy. “Do you believe me, Ben?”

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He looks at her the way a man may look at a forest fire that he has no escape from; he looks at her like she’s an oasis in the desert. She is both these things to him and she knows this, has always known it. Savior and destroyer, just as he is both an affliction and a long-awaited cure. “I believe you,” he whispers. He swallows. “You’re the only thing I ever believed in.

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He says it like it’s as much a curse as a blessing.

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Ben takes her hand. 

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They run.


	2. We Are the Concept

_**You said to me it won’t be long now  
We’ll leave the world and you will find me here  
My flesh is afraid, but I am not  
‘Cause love now is only the pain of needing** _ ****  
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There has always been an ache. An ache and a _knowing_. 

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As a child, Rey knew very few things for certain. She knew that the Jakku sun shone blindingly white during the planet’s summer. That the desert landscape had been transformed by a war fought and won years before her birth. 

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(In that wasteland of ruined iron and glass she would transform herself from a child waiting to be given to a woman ready to _take_.)

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Rey had known that she had been abandoned, while the why and the who eluded her. 

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Most of all she’d known that there was a _him_ , maybe a planet away, maybe across the vastness of the galaxy. A him who was an ache and a throb, a void. A bittersweet longing, one that filled her with mingled joy and terror when she took the time to meditate on it. She had been as certain of his existence as she was of her own. She had tried to search the stars and her mind for his face, and failed. All she had known was that he _was_ , and that he waited for her, and that finding him would be her salvation.

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Or her undoing. There would be no in-between.

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Rey sets the course for Jakku. It was never her home precisely, but for some reason it seems right to go there while they plan their next move. It takes everything in her not to try to contact Finn or Leia. At some point she knows that she’l have to. Finn will understand in time; he knows her well enough to have seen the depth of her loneliness and her searching. Leia will be angry at first, but that anger will be tempered by the relief of knowing that her son is no longer Snoke’s plaything.

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Rey concentrates hard on the coordinates and calculations, focusing on the feel of the buttons and knobs beneath her fingers. The Falcon has become a living thing to her, and one that she knows more intimately than the man she’s bound herself to.

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_The Force bound you. Neither of you were given the luxury of choice._

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Ben’s presence is a thing she can feel, as it always has been. She’s not ready to speak to him yet. Or look at him closely, for that matter. Her heart hasn’t stopped racing since they’d made their way back to the Falcon, and Rey finds herself fighting the urge not to weep or scream.

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Chewie had opted to take an escape pod to Khasshyk to wait for word from Leia, so they are the only two living things on board. It feels as though they may be the only living things in the galaxy.

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She doesn’t know if she can ever fully forgive Ben Solo. For the obvious things (and there may never be a day when she can’t hear the screams in her head, or eel his own guilt pouring off of him in sick waves,) and for the rest of it. When he touches her and banishes her loneliness with a look, when he’s at his kindest and most real, she feels that she can never forgive him for the dread and despair that she’d felt plunge into her chest like a knife the first time that she saw his face. When he’d taken o his mask not to reveal a monster but the face that she’d dreamt of and longed for and clung to for years. Long after she’d given up hope for her parents returning, she’d fixed her soul on his.

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That face and that man had become her hope. To find him and to discover that he’d aligned himself with the greatest force of evil in the galaxy was like being abandoned all over again.

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If Rey dwells on it too hard, she knows she’ll spiral down deeper into the pit that has beckoned her for her whole life. _Fall down her with me_ , it whispers. _Let it go. Let all of it fall away like water. Make him suffer for what he’s done. Make him pay for all of that sickness and rage._

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So she doesn’t allow it to consume her. She has come far, farther in a few years than most people travel in a lifetime. After all of the pain and grief she’s emerged on the other side with a prize she’s sought for years. Even though yielding to her own anger and doubt is seductive, she won’t allow herself. She owes herself that much.

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In the dark they cram themselves into one bunk that’s far too small for the both of them, and they cling to each other like children, the way that they’d both dreamed of during the years that separated them. Ben runs a knuckle down Rey’s cheek and she shivers, and in those moments she forgets to resent him. Forgets that he needs her forgiveness.

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They barely speak; there’s little need for it, when they’re two halves of one being.

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When they lay in the dark and the absence of loneliness is nearly an ache of its own, Rey’s love burns brighter than her anger.

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	3. Ribbon of Light

**_And she showed me her treasures of paper and tin_  
And we played a game only she could win  
And our fingers entwined like ribbons of night  
And we came through a doorway somewhere in the night **

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She doesn’t consult him about setting a course for Jakku. The thread that runs between them is old; she doesn’t remember a time before it. But the reality of them together, as one, is a new and fragile thing. They haven’t had time to mine the depths of the feeling between them, both the desperate longing and the pain of it. So they talk little, and it becomes enough. 

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Rey doesn’t know precisely what she plans to do there. Perhaps retrieve a few items with the most sentimental value, if they haven’t been scavenged. Maybe to remind herself that there was a time when things were simple and predictable, if not exactly good. 

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“Why Jakku?” Ben finally asks, burying his face in her hair. They’re twelve hours away. There’s no accusation in his voice, no censure, only simple curiosity. 

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She curls into his body, considers. Maybe she just wants to look. up into that endless blue sky, the same one that stretched out above her on all the long days and solitary nights of her childhood, and say I am not alone now. I was never alone. 

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“I just want to see it one last time. The last time I was there, it never occurred to me that I would never be back.” That’s not entirely true, of course. The ever-present whisper in her mind has always at least hinted at the future, at possible outcomes. Often she ignored that interior voice for fear that it would tell her something she couldn’t bear to hear, to know. “I think I just want to see it again. For all the time I was there, I had nothing.” 

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Sighing, Rey wraps an arm tight around him. What they have is not perfect. The ache between them is soothed, but it will always be there. But the pain is nearly worth it for the sense of absolute completion she feels. “I have something, now,” she whispers into the crook of his neck. “I have everything. Now I can remember Jakku and know that it wasn’t for nothing.”

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Everything else has changed. There is a part of her that expects the sky to be different, for the barren landscape to have given way to something green and alive. But when the Falcon lands on Jakku the sky is the same burning white, and the golden sand stretches out into seeming eternity. 

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It is familiar, even after everything. Familiar, but never home. It shaped her into the woman she is, but Jakku never was and never could be home. She stares out into the dessert, and glances over at Ben. 

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Home was always a person, rather than a place.

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Having him with her is balm against the raging loneliness that the dominated her nights and days here. 

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She maneuvers the Falcon through a minor sandstorm, gritting her teeth against the memory. Sandstorms meant death for those without shelter, and for those lucky enough to have somewhere to stay they meant days or weeks of isolation. Gradually the winds subside, and they reach her old shelter. The relic of the Imperium, that had been sanctuary and prison for most of her life. 

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Now she sees it through a dancing veil of sand, and doesn’t know what to feel. 

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Ben leans forward, peering out the front window. “Is that a downed AT-AT?” He asks, squinting. 

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Rey frowns, shrugs. “I didn’t even know what it was called for the longest time. Someone before me yanked out anything and everything of value years ago. It just, uh.” She hesitates, swallows on a dry throat. “It served its purpose.”

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He glances over at her. He doesn’t take her hand, but the look in his eyes has her throat beginning to ache. She’ll have to get used to this, to being seen. “You don’t have to go back in if it’ll hurt you.” 

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It will hurt her to see it, to bring those memories rushing back like a flood. But if there’s anything Rey has learned, it’s that pain and love can occupy a similar place in the mind and the soul. No thing or person has brought her more pain than the man beside her. Nothing in the universe could be more beloved to her. It’s a paradox that has kept her up nights. “I want some things out of it, if they haven’t been swiped,” she murmurs. “And just to see.”

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I want you to see it, she doesn’t say. You are my future, and I need you to see my past and know how it shaped me.

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The shell of it is important and would be even if the whole place had been picked over by scavengers in her absence. The shelter it provided was ultimately more important than the little odds and ends that she’d accumulate over the years. Those things made it into something resembling a home, but the aged metal walls were what protected her from the elements, and from Jakku’s other inhabitants. 

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She’d expected it all to be gone. Finding it all exactly as she’d left it is nearly more painful. 

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Her boots sound like they always have on the decaying steel of the floor. It bends and creaks even more under Ben’s weight. It is surreal to feel and hear the presence of another person in this place. 

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Wind and the passage of time have worn a foot-long hole in the ceiling, and white sunlight pours down into the interior of the AT-AT. It illuminates everything without the need for a candle. 

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Before coming, Rey had entreated the Force for numbness, for distance. It’s a sort of numbness that she feels now, looking at this place, at these things that used to be hers. But the distance she feels is a thin and fragile thing. Beneath it she feels a wild and wrenching sadness. For the little girl who lived here, or tried to. For all the lives she could have lived, simpler lives. 

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Beneath all of it is a gratitude so intense that it nearly weakens her knees. 

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The metal creaks under Ben’s heavy boots. “You were alone here. The whole time?” He moves slowly and carefully in his usual way. He looks around, but conspicuously doesn’t touch anything. 

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Rey nods. “Sometimes people tried to take me in. Some of them had good intentions. Others,” she grimaces, “not so much. It was safest to be alone.”

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It’s all still there. Neat and carefully ordered piles of scavenged parts that she hadn’t gotten around to trying to sell. Her old cot with the mattress coils that used to dig painfully into her already-sore muscles. The wall where she marked of the days.

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Thousands of sharp lines carved into the metal wall. Every line is a day of her life, and a night. Her eyes sting to look at it, but she blinks away. Dust and sand dance in the shaft of sunlight. 

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Ben’s back is turned to her. He carefully leans over an old metal slab that she’d used as a sort of desk, bracing himself. “You made yourself flowers,” he says quietly, almost too low for her to hear. 

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Rey squints into the dimly lit corner, and smiles in spite of herself. “Made those by hand. Used to take me hours, but people from Core Worlds would buy them sometimes. I kept some for myself.” 

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She presses her lips together to stop them from trembling. It sounds like she’s talking about someone else, someone who just barely eked out a life here. 

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Ben turns to her. “How did you even know what flowers looked like?”

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She shrugs. “I saw a book, once. From Coruscant.” She keeps her voice even, but her hands shake at the memory of that book. It was a travel guide of some sort, with vibrant pictures from planets all across the galaxy. Rey used to stare at those images, those exotic landscapes and people, until her eyes burned from the strain. She used to go to sleep imagining those places, those people. People with hope and futures and people to love them. 

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She’d kept the book until it fell into dust, and wept bitterly when it was gone. Tears spring into her eyes now, and she finds that she’s too tired to stop them. 

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There’s nothing to hide from him, anyway.

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She takes a deep breath, and plucks a handmade doll from beside the cot. With a trembling hand she tucks it carefully into her bag. The tears that roll down her face aren’t for herself, but for the little girl who had made that doll, and clung to it night after night. 

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“You’re everywhere, here,” Ben says suddenly. His eyes rake over the shelter, but he still hasn’t touched any of it. 

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Rey clears her throat, rubs roughly at her face. “What?”

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He looks her straight in the eye. “All of it. Everything you accumulated. Not just the things themselves, but the fact that you chose them, and kept them around you.” He pauses, brows furrowed. He doesn’t move forward and doesn’t try to touch her. She’s grateful for that, because if he tried to touch her she feels that she might shatter from it. “Most people would have just tried to survive in a place like this. But you made it yours.” 

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She swallows painfully, affects a shrug. “There was nothing else to do.” 

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Ben moves closer to her, and the metal beneath their feet creaks. “There’s a light that follows you, Rey.” He hesitates, eyes wide in the dark. “I can feel it, even here.” 

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Rey takes a deep, shaking breath. “I’ve seen what I need to see, took what I wanted. We can go now.” And never, ever come back.

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Ben pauses, considers her. “It would have hardened anyone but you. You don’t realize that yet, or don’t appreciate it. Maybe someday you will.”

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———

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When they get back on the Falcon, Rey sets a course for a random planet. The name is a strange one, one that rolls off the tongue like a hiss. She’d read about it in the book she’d loved so desperately. It lies on the other end of the galaxy, distant enough that it shouldn’t be of any importance to whatever is left of the First Order, or the Resistance. It’s another desert planet, but one with a vast and shallow ocean. 

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She’s missed the ocean, since Ach-to. 

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For a moment she stares out at the fallen AT-AT that had been her home, and the swirling sands of Jakku. This time, she knows that she’ll never see it again. The thought is painful and liberating at once. 

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Her fingers dance across the controls. She doesn’t look over at Ben yet. Her mind feels like its been scraped raw, and if he looks over at her with those eyes she knows that she won’t be able to maintain control.

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She hadn’t been able to anticipate what returning to Jakku would cost her. But given how much she’s gained, it seems a worthy exchange, to look back in on all those years of despair and emerge on the other side of it. 

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They shoot off into the atmosphere, away from Jakku and from everything that is familiar. Terror and exhilaration fight for dominance in Rey’s chest. There’s no way to know if they’ll be pursued, and by whom. For all she knows, the forces of light and dark that have hounded the two of them all their lives will follow them across the galaxy, across the universe. 

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Ben’s hand slowly, tentatively, finds hers on the console. He squeezes gently. Not demanding, not questing. Merely present and alive, and hers.

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A thousand stars stream past , bathing them in light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well.
> 
> I know this is sappy, but I think we may all kind of need it at this point. This will (hopefully) be one of many fix-it fics I tackle.
> 
> Stay strong, guys!

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing crazy original about this, but I had to throw my hat into the Reylo ring before TROS confirms or denies us forever.
> 
> Title and epigraph for Chapter 1 from “Particle Flux” by Chelsea Wolfe. Epigraph for Chapter 2 from “The Waves Have Come,” also by Chelsea Wolfe. Chelsea is....rich in Reylo content.


End file.
